Before you choose a job, see if it’s compatible with this four-step system I developed for my clients: the LTTL SYSTEM.

I first used this system in a small Scanner workshop, and it was so successful at overcoming commitment phobia that I now use it with many of my Scanner clients. I think you’re going to like this one. The letters stand for Learn, Try, Teach, Leave.

In your Scanner Daybook, write up a one-page plan for every career or interest you’re considering, using the LTTL System. For example, let’s say you’re considering a job overseeing operations for a large company. You’d write something like this:

Step 1: Learn. For 6 months, I’ll learn how to run the central office of a national graphics firm, coming up with new systems—but only on paper.

Step 2: Try. After the learning curve levels out, I’ll try to get my new systems implemented, perfect them, make sure they run, or build the prototype to iron out all the kinks. This might take 2 more months.

Step 3: Teach. When it’s clear that everything I’ve designed works brilliantly and the company wants me to stay and run it, I’ll explain I can stay only long enough to teach someone else to do the job. Maybe this will take a few more months, and what I teach each day will go into the employees’ manual I’ve arranged to write for the company. (I’ll naturally be very well paid for these services I’m rendering.)

Step 4: Leave. On this day, I’ll have my farewell party, at which I’ll receive tearful good-byes and be given a severance package, which allows me to live for 1 year without working. I’ve arranged for this by showing the bosses how much money I’d be saving them.

During my free year, I’ll pursue my own interests and keep an eye out for the most interesting job opportunity in a different field entirely, at which time I’ll repeat the entire process.

For the purposes of illustration, I haven’t kept this explanation 100 percent realistic, but I know for certain that the LTTL System is completely doable in a form you’ll find useful. Just reading it might have given you a new perspective on the whole issue of commitment, as it’s done for so many other Scanners.

If "commitment" looked more like the LTTL model, I doubt you’d mind making one. Signing up for a dreary work life is something no one should have to do. And no one should blame you, a Scanner, for loving only the designing and learning aspects of your job. Scanners need to learn, to invent, and to tinker with things. That’s how they’re wired.

Rarely will a Scanner be happy sticking around to turn the switches on and off or keep the system humming. To require execution and maintenance of Scanners is not a good use of their ability. Talent is hard to find. A smart boss knows and respects it.

In your Daybook, write your one-page LTTL plan. If you are thinking of multiple jobs or activities, go ahead and write a few of them. In a new comment on this page, tell us about your experience with the LTTL System. Any insights? Any change of heart about commitment? Will you implement your plan? Tell us! Then read the rest of the comments and see if you would like to reply to any of them. If someone else comes up with a great idea for how to Learn, Try, Teach, and Leave, give them your thanks and feel free to borrow it.

Please be sure to subscribe to future comments on this exercise or to check back here on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for new ones.

Use the Next link (up above the title) to continue on to What I Learned from Chapter 4 after you are done adding your comments.

Book Club Help Page

Welcome / Agenda Page

The big problem, I believe, isn’t that people don’t make career commitments; it’s that they make them too soon. Instead of learning everything they can before they sign up, commitment is seen as some kind of virtue, an act of character or willpower, almost like planting your flag in the ground and pronouncing that you will pledge yourself come hell or high water.

You wouldn’t buy a house that way or decide what city or country to live in, and you wouldn’t choose a surgeon that way if you needed an operation. (You wouldn’t even buy a pair of jeans that way!) Hopefully, you’d try to find out as much as possible before you decided on any permanent commitments.

But few of us remember to try out a career. Here’s one way to do it:

Go to your Scanner Daybook and write a first-person, present-tense fantasy of what you imagine your workday will be like. Imagine you are actually in any job you’re considering. Place yourself where you imagine you’d be working and put your brain and hands to work, like this:

"I’m standing by a drawing table working on a graphics presentation of a concept that’s not easy to understand. I’m finding ways to illustrate it that will make it very clear, and that’s fun. I arrived at work at 10 a.m., as I do every day. In an hour we’ll have a meeting with all the people on my project, and I’ll show them my ideas…"

Once you’ve done that, you’ll understand what you want. Then you can start interviewing people in the field to see what really goes on.

But what if you don’t have any idea where you’d be sitting or what you’d be doing? Then you’re not ready to say yes to the position.

You’re not ready to say no, either.

And isn’t it wonderful that you found that out before you signed on? Now, how can you find out? Well, I guess you could change your name and sign on as a temp or wear a disguise and work in the mailroom for a few months. Not always possible, I fear, but it would certainly give you an inside look at corporate culture. More realistically, you can talk to some people in the position and do a reality check. How do you find such people? Call anyone and everyone you know to ask if they personally know someone in the position you’re considering. The person who grooms your dog or tutors your niece probably has a family member working in the company you’re looking at. Call whoever will respond cheerfully to hearing from you and offer them a "degrees of separation challenge" to find someone who knows someone who knows the inside of the place you’re thinking of going.

And if that gets you nowhere, start hanging out (in your best corporate disguise) at a nearby lunch restaurant or after-work location and watch, or even get to know, some of the employees.

Because if you don’t know where you’ll sit or what you’ll actually be doing, it’s way too early to consider any commitment, and your fears are absolutely appropriate.

As Barbara suggests, use your Scanner Daybook for this exercise. Do not skip this one if you’re not concerned about committing to a corporate job at this stage of your life. Get a little creative. How can you get a clear picture of what it will be like to write and self-publish a book or to spend a year in a travel trailer or to volunteer six months to work with apes in Africa? Fantasize, then check it out by finding someone who knows someone or by hanging out in the right place to meet people who know. In a new comment on this page, tell us about your experience. Did it calm your fears? Did it help you say no? Any surprises? Then read the rest of the comments and see if you would like to ask questions of someone whose experience was different from yours.

Please be sure to subscribe to future comments on this exercise or to check back here on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for new ones.

Use the Next link (up above the title) to continue on to Exercise 3: Try a LTTL after you are done adding your comment.

Book Club Help Page

Welcome / Agenda Page

The commitmentphobe’s list of mistaken assumptions:

1. You must choose one and only one path in life.
2. Everything you love has to be a career. Doing something for pleasure doesn’t count.
3. If you’re not in love with your job, it will be a living hell.
4. You have to get it right, because every career choice requires a huge investment of time and money.
5. Once you make your choice, you serve a life sentence with no chance of parole.
6. If you’re not passionate to the point of obsession, you’ll never be content to give up all your other interests.

These mistaken assumptions add up to a contract signed in blood and carved in stone, inspired not only by misinformation but by a dread of wasting one’s life and by the desire for a single passion so great it can make a life sentence tolerable. No wonder Scanners refuse to make commitments. But there’s one problem with their conclusion: Not one thing on that list is true.

Use your Scanner Daybook for this exercise. Did you feel any of these were true before you read Refuse to Choose? Did Barbara change your mind? In a new comment on this page, tell us which one(s) you have abandoned. You may also argue for any you still believe to be true. Then read the rest of the comments and see if you would like to reply to any of them.

Please be sure to subscribe to future comments on this exercise or to check back here on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for new ones. If there are a lot of comments by then, look for an Older Comments link to see any that do not fit on this page.

Use the Next link (up above the title) to continue on to Exercise 2: The Career Tryout after you are done adding your comment.

Book Club Help Page

Welcome / Agenda Page